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Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs - Nobel Lecture

Nobel Lecture by John P. Holdren, Chair of
the Executive Committee of the Pugwash Council

Arms Limitation and Peace Building in the Post-Cold-War World

Your Majesties, Your Excellencies, Ladies
and Gentlemen:

It is a special privilege for me, as Chair of the Executive
Committee of the Pugwash Council, to present this lecture on
behalf of the Pugwash Conferences on the occasion of our
organization's sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with our founder and
President, Professor Joseph Rotblat. The award
to the Pugwash Conferences is the highest form of recognition for
the efforts, on behalf of arms reductions and peace building, of
all of the thousands of scientists and public figures, from more
than 100 countries, who have taken part in Pugwash activities
since the first meeting in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, nearly 40 years
ago. I am sure I speak for all these Pugwash participants, not
just for the Pugwash Council, in thanking the Norwegian Nobel
Committee for this high honor to our organization and our
founder.

I am sure, also, that all of us regard this
prize less as a reward for past efforts on behalf of peace than
as encouragement and reinforcement for the continuing efforts
that are still required - from Pugwash, from the many other
non-governmental organizations committed to building peace and
international cooperation, from governments, and, indeed, from
every individual who cares about the future of our civilization.
It is mainly on the nature and scope of this continuing need that
I wish to focus my comments, on behalf of the Pugwash
Conferences, this afternoon. In composing these thoughts, I have
drawn heavily on the suggestions of many members of the Pugwash
Council, as well as on recent statements and declarations issued
by the Council collectively on these topics.

The long dark night of the Cold War has
finally passed, and with its passing the peril of a global
thermonuclear conflagration has substantially receded. This
alleviation of the nuclear danger is unquestionably a great
blessing and a proper cause for celebration. But it is not, as so
many seem to be supposing, a cause for either self-congratulation
or complacency. Those who are congratulating themselves for the
role they played in this narrow escape - the hawks, who believe
that potent deterrent forces and frequent saber-rattling kept the
nuclear peace, and the doves, who believe that candid
communication and negotiated arms-control agreements made the
difference - are all probably underestimating the extent to which
good luck, more than clear-eyed leadership or sensible restraint,
allowed the superpowers to careen for forty years along the edge
of the nuclear chasm without falling in. And those who
complacently believe that the danger of nuclear destruction is
now completely under control have simply not surveyed the new
landscape of insecurity that the post-Cold-War dawn has
revealed.

The troublesome features of this landscape
that must now command our attention are at least six in
number:

* First are the dangers posed by the tens
of thousands of nuclear weapons that are still deployed at
various stages of readiness for use - primarily in the United
States and Russia but also, with numbers in the hundreds, in the
"intermediate" and undeclared nuclear-weapon states. Contrary to
public perceptions, it is still all too possible that these
nuclear weapons could be used, in greater or lesser numbers, as a
result of various combinations of crisis conditions, electronic
and mechanical malfunctions, breaks in the chain of official
command and control, and human errors, misjudgments, or misguided
impulses.

* Second is the danger that the
psychological residues of the Cold War mentality, if allowed free
rein, could bring a halt to the progress in arms reductions that
has been underway and could lead, ultimately, to the renewal of
increasingly expensive and risky military competitions and
confrontations between Russia and the West, even in the absence
of the former Cold War's ideological basis. The reality of this
peril is apparent in the failure of the United States and Russia,
until now, to ratify either the START 2 agreement or the Chemical
Weapons Convention,1 as well
as in the very serious possibility that the United States will
choose to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty - the
cornerstone of nuclear arms limitation for nearly a quarter
century - in order to pursue the illusion of a national defense
against ballistic missiles.

* Third are the dangers of further
proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
capabilities into the possession of more and more nations. This
problem may actually have been aggravated by the end of the Cold
War, which increased ambiguities about the regional security
interests and commitments of the major nuclear-weapon states. The
proliferation problem will certainly be aggravated if the
existing nuclear-weapon states continue, now that the Cold War is
over, to act as if their possession of nuclear weapons still
confers crucial security benefits which they intend to keep
indefinitely, contrary to their obligations under the recently
extended Non-Proliferation Treaty.

* Fourth is the set of difficulties and
dangers, both physical and political, posed by the specific
stocks of nuclear and chemical weapons made surplus by the end of
the Cold War and the accompanying arms-control agreements. These
problems entail, on the physical side, the safe storage and
dismantlement of these surplus weapons and the disposition of
their active ingredients in ways that convincingly preclude their
re-use for military purposes. Undue delay in these endeavors will
not only prolong the risk of re-incorporation of these weapons
and weapon ingredients into the national arsenals from which they
came, or into other national or sub-national arsenals by way of
sale or theft; it also will produce a problem of political
perceptions about whether the countries that own these weapons
and materials really intend to get rid of them at all; such
perceptions would be an obstacle both to further arms reductions
and to non-proliferation.

* The fifth set of problems in the
post-Cold-War security landscape has to do with the dangers and
destruction engendered by local armed conflicts, actual and
incipient, arising from all of the traditional causes of war:
religious and ethnic hatreds, disputes over territory and
resources, the tensions of emergent statehood, the aspirations of
power-hungry dictators, and the stresses of frustrated economic
aspirations. Such conflicts occurred throughout the Cold War, of
course, as well as before; but, like the proliferation dangers
already mentioned, they may have become even more dangerous in
its aftermath. Confined in geographic scope but not in ferocity
or in the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants, these wars
have been fueled in many cases by vast flows of conventional
weaponry from armories built up to service the Cold War, as well
as by emergent indigenous arms industries in the South; they have
already seen the use of chemical weapons in some instances, and
are likely to see wider use of weapons of mass destruction in the
future; and the extant array of regional and global security
institutions seems almost powerless to prevent or contain
them.

* Last in my order of presentation of the
security issues that deserve our attention in the post-Cold-War
world, although by no means last in importance, is the set of
interactions linking security, economic development, and
environment. It should be obvious that a durable global peace
cannot be attained in a world in which a substantial fraction of
the population languishes in poverty. There can be no lasting
security, even for the rich, in a world full of discontented
poor. It is perhaps less obvious, but no less true, that the
durable and pervasive prosperity so essential to durable peace
depends as much on environmental conditions and processes as on
economics ones. Yet current practices in agriculture, forestry,
fisheries, energy supply, and manufacturing are clearly eroding
the environmental underpinnings of prosperity worldwide, and the
combination of population growth and rising consumption per
person is increasing the pressure on environmental resources much
faster than technological improvements, at current level of
effort, can abate it. There is simply no sign of the levels of
investment and cooperation in environmentally sustainable
development that would be required to achieve a durable
prosperity for everyone in today's world of nearly 6 billion
people - not to mention tomorrow's world of 9 or 10 billion.
Persisting in this oversight is a prescription for a degree of
misery, social and political instability, and conflict in the
twenty-first century that no amount of effort at arms control and
crisis management will be able to contain.

Although the Pugwash Conferences came into
being, four decades ago, in response to the extraordinary dangers
posed by thermonuclear weapons, and while the pursuit of ways to
reduce those dangers has always remained at the core of Pugwash
concerns, our founders recognized from the outset the
seamlessness of the web of interconnections linking the nuclear
danger with the dangers of other weapons of mass destruction,
with conventional conflicts, and with the ultimate causes of war
rooted in the human condition. Thus the Pugwash agenda expanded,
in the early years of the organization, to embrace not only the
perils of nuclear weapons but also those aspects of the wider
security landspace in which the Pugwash format - natural
scientists meeting with other scholars and with political and
military figures for off-the-record exploration of the issues -
might be able to make a contribution.

That Pugwash was constituted from the
beginning not solely along bilateral lines but rather with much
broader participation was a great asset in dealing with this
wider agenda, in which the interests of every region are at stake
and the participation of every region in the solutions is
required. Pugwash efforts in the 1960s on the safeguards regime
for the Non-Proliferation Treaty and on the Biological Weapons
Convention, in the 1970s on a code of conduct for technology
transfer for development, and from the 1970s to the present on
the resolution of regional conflicts, on the Chemical Weapons
Convention, and on limiting the accumulation and transfer of
conventional weapons, have all benefited particularly from the
organization's multinational reach. The establishment, in the
1980s and 1990s, of Student/Young Pugwash chapters in many
countries and the important work of Pugwash, throughout its
history, on the desirability and feasibility of ultimately
achieving a nuclear-weaponfree world, were also facilitated by
our multilateral character.

At the same time, the strength of U.S. and
Soviet participation in Pugwash in its first three decades, and
the strength of U.S. and Russian participation today, has enabled
our organization to treat, with some effectiveness, those aspects
of the nuclear danger that have been dominated by the nuclear
arsenals and postures of these powers. This dimension of
Pugwash's activities has included the organization's efforts in
the 1950s and 1960s on the technical basis for the Limited Test
Ban Treaty, in the 1960s on the issues underlying the ABM Treaty,
in the 1980s on the intermediate-range nuclear forces issue, and
in the 1990s on managing - and shrinking - U.S. and Russian
nuclear arsenals and nuclear-weapon-production complexes in the
aftermath of the Cold War.

My purpose in this capsule characterization
of how the bilateral and multilateral facets of the Pugwash
organization have related to our work over the past 38 years has
not been to offer a history of Pugwash (which would be a larger
task than befits this lecture) but only to suggest that the
structure and historical preoccupations of our organization are
reasonably well matched to the six-fold list of post-Cold-War
security problems that I outlined earlier. All of these issues
have evolved, of course, but at least the predecessors of all of
them have been on the Pugwash agenda for many years. Accordingly,
we think we have some ideas about what needs to be done. Let me
take the remainder of this lecture to outline some of this
thinking. In doing so, I will deal with the six problem areas in
the order in which I presented them before.

First, with respect to the danger of use of
the nuclear weapons still deployed, it is most important that all
nations deploying nuclear weapons should move promptly to a "zero
alert" nuclear posture. This would entail making it physically
impossible to launch nuclear weapons except after a time delay of
hours or even days (accomplished, for example, by demounting the
warheads from delivery vehicles and storing them separately). As
long as they were invulnerably based, nuclear weapons in this
condition would retain their deterrent capacity against the use
of nuclear weapons by others. (This so-called "minimum deterrent"
role is the only rationale for nuclear weapons for which a
halfway persuasive case can be made, and even that case, the
Pugwash Council thinks, is provisional and temporary; but more
about that in a moment.) In any event, such a deterrent function
does not require that the reaction to a nuclear attack should be
instantaneous, and giving up the possibility of an instantaneous
reaction has the great benefit of practically eliminating the
danger of accidental nuclear war. Accompanying the physical
implementation of "zero alert" postures should be unilateral
commitments of no-first-use and no threat of use of nuclear
weapons by all nuclear-weapon states, pending early conclusion of
a treaty to this effect.

Second, with respect to the danger of
stagnation and reversal of ongoing arms-reduction processes, the
immediate exercise of forceful leadership by President Clinton
and President Yeltsin is called for in order to bring about the
ratification, by the U.S. Senate and the Russian Duma, of both
the START 2 agreement and the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Russian agreement to ratify START 2 would be facilitated, for
reasons both economic and military, by the early initiation of
negotiations toward a START 3 agreement entailing deeper cuts, of
tactical as well as strategic systems, and reserve warheads as
well as deployed ones. Every effort should be made, as well, to
engage the United Kingdom, France, China, and the undeclared
nuclear-weapon states in the START 3 process. It also must be
recognized that abandoning the ABM Treaty would surely doom START
2 as well as all efforts to achieve deeper reductions in U.S. and
Russian offensive nuclear forces or to bring the possessors of
smaller nuclear arsenals into the reduction process - all this
for the illusion of a defense against nuclear attack, not the
reality of one, which for fundamental reasons will remain out of
reach.

Third, in the matter of proliferation of
nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, and of the
delivery systems for these, the most important next steps are up
to the existing nuclear-weapon powers. Prompt achievement of a
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty2 - without loopholes for low-yield
tests or so-called "peaceful nuclear explosions" - is rightly
seen by non-nuclear-weapon states as part of the basic bargain
sealed by the recent indefinite extension of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty. Among non-nuclear-weapon states, pacts
for mutual reassurance and joint monitoring of non-proliferation
commitments - such as that agreed by Brazil and Argentina in 1994
- should be pursued as useful complements to the NPT and regional
Nuclear Weapon Free Zones. Ultimately though, the prevention of
proliferation will depend on the readiness of the nuclear-weapon
states to continually reduce the prominence of nuclear weapons in
their foreign and military policies and, indeed, to find ways of
moving toward a nuclear-weapon-free world. The idea that a few
nations are entitled to retain nuclear weapons for "deterrent"
purposes indefinitely, while all others are expected to refrain
from acquiring this ostensible benefit, is untenable in the long
run. In the meantime, every statement or action by a
nuclear-weapon state reinforcing the idea that nuclear weapons
might have military utility will provoke interest on the part of
other countries in acquiring them; and states that are thus
provoked but lack the means to acquire them are likely to try to
acquire instead the "poor man's" weapons of mass destruction -
chemical and biological weapons.

Fourth, with respect to the dismantling of
surplus nuclear and chemical weapons and, especially, the
protection and ultimate disposition of their active ingredients,
the foot-dragging that has characterized much U.S. and Russian
implementation of such measures - including, particularly,
cooperative programs between the two countries that have been
authorized and negotiated but only fractionally carried out - is
deplorable. While this problem has received some high-level
political attention on both sides, it needs more. The responsible
bureaucrats in both countries, most of whom appear to be in no
great hurry to get on with the job, need to be reminded in
particular that protecting plutonium and highly enriched uranium
- and ultimately disposing of these materials in ways that
effectively preclude their reuse in weapons - represent not only
one of the most urgent arms control and non-proliferation tasks
but also one of the most cost-effective.

Fifth, with respect to the local conflicts
raging day-in and day-out at all too many locations around the
world, a strategy for abatement begins with the recognition that
nearly all of the killing and maiming in these wars is being done
by artillery, mortars, small arms, and land mines, and that most
of this equipment in most cases is imported. It ought to be
possible, therefore, to limit this violence by restricting
international flows of light weapons; doing so poses practical
difficulties, but a determined effort including strengthened
export controls, scrapping stockpiles of surplus light weapons,
and helping governments improve their border and customs controls
is well worth undertaking. Adding a prohibition of anti-personnel
land mines to the United Nations Inhumane Weapons Convention
would also be worthwhile.3
Taking seriously the problem of local conflicts also compels
attention to the evident inadequacies of the peacekeeping
capabilities of the United Nations and of the other international
security organizations, such as NATO, that exist in many regions.
Clearly, these organizations can be no stronger than their member
states are willing to allow them to be, and so far they have not
been allowed to be strong enough. The post-Cold-War world needs a
more powerful United Nations, probably with a standing volunteer
force - owing loyalty directly to the UN rather than to
contingents from individual nations - as recommended by the
Commission on Global Governance.

The most intractable of the six security
problems I have mentioned is likely to be the one that relates
not to the "tools" of conflict - to weapons and military forces -
but to the roots of conflicts in the inadequacies of the economic
and environmental circumstances of a majority of the world's
people. The overwhelming economic and environmental predicaments
of the poor cannot be solved by the poor alone without
substantial cooperation from the rich, and, conversely, the
predicament of the poor cannot be allowed to persist without
peril to the rich. We live under one atmosphere, on the shores of
one ocean, our countries linked by flows of people, money, goods,
weapons, drugs, diseases, and ideas. Either we will achieve an
environmentally sustainable prosperity for all, in a world where
weapons of mass destruction have disappeared or become
irrelevant, or we will all suffer from the chaos, conflict, and
destruction resulting from the failure to achieve this.

Two of the most distinguished
scientist-statesmen of our age - the American geochemist Harrison
Brown and the Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov (Pugwash
participants both) - concluded independently in works published
in 1954 and 1968, respectively,4 that the cooperative effort needed
to create the basis for durable prosperity, and hence durable
security, for all the world's people would require an investment
equivalent to 10 to 20 percent of the rich countries' GNPs,
sustained over several decades. In 1995, these figures do not
seem far wrong, but they are said to be politically unrealistic:
nothing approaching them has ever been seriously contemplated by
the world's governments. Until this changes, a world free of war
- correctly understood by the founders of the Pugwash conferences
to be the essential concomitant of a world free of nuclear
weapons - will remain just a dream.

Clearly, then, the work of Pugwash - and of
all the other nongovernmental organizations that labored through
the Cold War years to build up peaceful cooperation and build
down military confrontation - is far from done. The agenda of
dangers still to be overcome is hardly less daunting than the one
faced by the founders of the Pugwash Conferences in the Cold War
gloom of the 1950s. But the world did finally escape the Cold
War, and with a bit of luck, a bit of wisdom, and a lot of work
it may yet escape the remaining dangers, too. It is a pleasure to
thank, on behalf of the Pugwash organization, the thousands of
participants in Pugwash meetings whose efforts, I think, have
contributed measurably to making a safer and better world; to
thank the many sponsors whose support over the years made the
activities of Pugwash possible; and to thank, once again, the
Norwegian Nobel Committee for this most welcome recognition of
our past work and most helpful impetus for the work ahead.

1.
The U.S. ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, the
75th nation to do so.

2. In
1996 the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was signed by the
U.S., the USSR and many other nations.

3.
The United Nations Inhuman Weapons Convention, which prohibited
the production and use of weapons "which may be deemed to be
excessively injurious or to have indeterminate effects" was
approved in 1981 and ratified by 25 countries by 1987. It did not
explicitly ban landmines, and it was the failure of the review
conference in 1997 to do this which led to the successful efforts
of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines to bring about the
into effect in March 1999. For this achievement the Nobel Peace
Prize for 1997 was awarded jointly to the ICBL and its
coordinator, Jody Williams of the United States.